Hitler's Last Plot

You have probably heard of the 1963 film The Great Escape, about the actual POW prison break in WWII, in which 200 prisoners tunneled out of their camp.  It was truly a great attempt, but in the end only 76 made it out of the camp before the escape was discovered, 23 of those were re-captured and returned to prison camps, only three made it home, and 50 were murdered upon capture as Hitler’s retribution for their attempt.  Several of the 23 that were sent back to prison camps ended up at the Sauchsenhausen Concentration Camp outside of Berlin, where several other VIP prisoners are held, and that is where the new book Hitler’s Last Plot opens.

The book, by Ian Sayer and Jeremy Dronfield, sounded interesting when I heard the summary: 139 VIP prisoners (including European Presidents, Prime Ministers, Generals, Great Escapers, spies, anti-Nazi clerics, celebrities and multiple Germans that had taken part, or were family of, assassination plots on the Fuhrer) all being used as pawns or human shields in the last days of the war.  It is almost unbelievable and even more unbelievable that I had never heard of this crazy bit of history.

The book reads like a season of the hit TV show 24.  Each chapter is a day in the last month of the war and although it follows this group of prisoners, their story manages to cover almost the entire battle front of the German regime’s collapse.  Starting with a few of the prisoners in camps around Berlin, the collection of VIP prisoners are steadily moved south from one notorious concentration camp to the next until they are all together in Dachau, outside of Munich.  Then, just as Dachau is about to be liberated by the Americans, the group is moved on to Austria and finally into Italy, where the war is essentially already over.  Throughout this saga, other prisoners are being exterminated all around them as part of Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’, and the VIPs are left to wonder when they will be next.

Trying to keep track of 139 protagonists and their ever changing antagonists is a challenge, but the authors did a great job keeping the reader abreast of who’s who.  The eclectic mix of prisoners also becomes a theme in the book with many unlikely allies, friends, and even lovers born out of the shared hardships.  This makes for an interesting study of both bridging differences and the Stockholm syndrome. 

I always enjoy checking the notes section of books to see what kind of sources and fun facts they might include, and this book was quite interesting there as well.  The authors did extensive research and were even able to identify errors in the source material based on this research.  The epilogue also has some startling revelations about both prisoners and guards from the years after the war.

 

So, obviously, I recommend the book and hope you enjoy it as much as I did when you read it.  You can find it on Amazon, but I recommend supporting your local bookstore or buy it directly from the publisher here.